[00b5]

Just buy as many drives as you need, from somewhere you trust. Its probably (statistically speaking) more important that the hdds be shipped properly these days than worrying about batches.

Also, hopefully we can all agree that you do NOT need to buy all your drives at once, or from the same vendor/etc to make most non enterprise type of raids/sans/nas work.

Besides, the RMA process will insure you get your drives from different batches in the long run /sarcasm

I'd NEVER push anyone who needs to buy 4 large hdds to go to 4 different stores and get 4 different brands/etc. If they want to do it, knock yourself out. But its not needed. Maybe I'd tell them that if they were about to purchase 10 or 16 hdds to mix them up a little because of the bad batch possibility, but still.

In the end, what you should worry about (much more than bad hdd batches/etc) is how to backup your HUGE media library, and how to recover from (an eventual, cause they WILL happen) hdd failure. Either have backups, or be willing to rerip/encode/download/etc all your media. HDDs are mechanical devices, and they WILL fail eventually.

Just also want to thank Poofy for this concise thread, and everyone else that goes out of their way to make things like Pis/chomeboxes/windows/OE/etc work as well as they do and give us SO many good options that we need a summary thread like this.